Is hardware board required if hope to upstream a new arm/arm64 soc?

[Li Chen]

Hi Arnd,
 ---- On Mon, 11 Jul 2022 22:49:09 +0800  Arnd Bergmann <arnd at arndb.de> wrote --- 
 > On Wed, Oct 20, 2021 at 9:47 AM Li Chen <lchen at ambarella.com> wrote:
 > >
 > > Hi, all
 > >
 > > I wonder if a soc design vendor try to get their new socs upstreamed, do
 > > maintainers need to get hardware/boards from vendors to verify bootable
 > > or other issues?
 > 
 > Hi Li,
 > 
 > I found your old email today after I saw your recent kernel patches.
 > 
 > To answer your original question: there is no requirement to have hardware
 > available anywhere, in fact I have very little hardware from any of the
 > platforms.
 > 
 > The deal is that upstream maintainers care about long-term maintainability,
 > I want to make sure that adding a new platform does not make it harder
 > for other developers to do tree-wide changes that require modifications
 > to each platform, to avoid regressions.
 > 
 > Whether the code works correctly in the first place is up to the
 > downstream maintainer who submits the code. If you want to add
 > a new platform, I expect you to test the code.

Got you, we will definitely test codes.

 > 
 > On the other hand, if you want to integrate a platform into automated
 > test setups, the kernelci.org team is usually happy to either add
 > boards into their fully automated labs, or to link up to third-party
 > labs that are able to run kernels built by kernelci.

Good to know that kernelci can add boards.

 > 
 > Let me know if you have any other questions about upstreaming,
 > I would very much like to see ambarella SoCs get supported by
 > the kernel.

Thanks for your kindness!

 > 
 >       Arnd
 > 

Regards,
Li